A Life in Letters

by George Orwell

  Love to Mamaine. It is beautiful spring weather at last and daffodils out all over the place. Each winter I find it harder and harder to believe that spring will actually come.

  Yours

  George

  [XVIII, 2955, pp.213-4; typewritten]

  1.International Rescue and Relief Committee.

  2.Michael Foot (1913-2010), politician, writer, and journalist, for much of his life on the extreme left of the Labour Party, was MP for Devonport, 1945-55; for Ebbw Vale, 1960-92 and Leader of the Labour Party (in Opposition), 1980-83. For Tribune he was assistant editor, 1937-38; Managing Director, 1945-74; editor, 1948-52, 1955-60. His many books include Guilty Men (with Frank Owen and Peter Howard, 1940), The Pen and the Sword (1957), The Politics of Paradise (1988).

  3.John Randal Baker (1900-1984), Reader in Cytology, Oxford University, 1955-67; joint editor of the Journal of Microscopical Science, 1946-64; Professorial Fellow, New College Oxford, 1964-67. He received the Oliver Bird Medal for researches into chemical contraception in 1958. Baker was an important influence on Orwell (see 19.3.47).

  4.Conrad Hal Waddington (1905-1975) was Buchanan Professor of Animal Genetics, University of Edinburgh. His publications include The Scientific Attitude (1941), and The Ethical Animal (1960). Orwell, while at the BBC, engaged him to broadcast talks to India.

  5.The Modern Quarterly, founded 1938, aimed at contributing to a realistic, social revaluation of the arts and sciences, devoting special attention to studies based upon the materialistic interpretation of the universe. It lapsed during the war and was revived in December 1945, with Dr John Lewis as editor. Marxist in outlook, with many eminent scientists as contributors, it attacked, among other things, what it called 'persistent attempts to confuse moral issues', for example, Orwell's 'sophistries' in 'Notes on Nationalism' in Polemic (XVII, 2668, pp. 141—57), which was translated and published in French, Dutch, Italian, and Finnish journals.

  To Yvonne Davet*

  8 April 1946

  27B Canonbury Square,

  Islington, N 1

  Chere Madame Davet,

  I have just received your letter of the 6th. Two or three days ago I met Mademoiselle Odile Pathe, the publisher who is going to bring out Animal Farm. I didn't know she was in London, but she rang me up. I told her you had translated Homage to Catalonia, and that you had sent her the translation, but I suppose she won't be back in France until next week. She seemed to me to have a lot more courage than most publishers, and she explained that because she is in Monaco, she has less to fear1 than the others, except for the paper. In any case Homage to Catalonia is a much less dangerous book than Animal Farm. It seems that the Communists now exert direct censorship on French publishers (I have heard they have 'prohibited' Gallimard publishing Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls), and it's quite clear that they wouldn't let Animal Farm get through if they could find a way of suppressing it. If Mademoiselle Pathe has the courage to publish one book, she would have the courage to publish the other, if it seemed worth her while financially.

  As for the essays, let me explain how things stand. In 1940 I published a book, Inside the Whale, which didn't sell very well, and shortly afterwards nearly all the copies were destroyed in the blitz. The book I've just published contains two of the original essays (there were only three), and eight others that I'd published in magazines in the last five years. One, or perhaps two, have a purely English interest. (One is on boys' weeklies, the other on comic postcards--which are after all pretty similar in France.) At the moment Nagel Paris have a copy of Inside the Whale--they asked for it before the publication of Critical Essays. I can't quite remember whether a copy of Critical Essays was sent to a French publisher,2 but I'll ask my agent. If there was a question of translating one or the other, naturally it would be better to choose Critical Essays. Anyway, I'll send you a copy as soon as possible, but I haven't got one at the moment. The first edition is out of print, and the second edition hasn't come out. One could easily publish the book without the essays of purely local interest. I certainly think the essay on Dickens is worth translating.

  Recently I had a letter from Victor Serge,3 who is in Mexico, and who is going to send me the manuscript of his memoirs. I hope my publisher, Warburg, will publish them.

  At the end of April I'm going to leave London to spend six months in Scotland, but I'm not sure precisely when I'm going, as there will certainly be problems in sending on the furniture. My house is in the Hebrides, and I hope to be fairly quiet so that I can start a new novel. In the last few years I've been writing three articles a week, and I'm dreadfully tired. My little boy is very well. I'm sending a photograph of the two of us. It looks as if I'm giving him a good spanking, but really I'm changing his trousers.4 Before I go I'll send you my new address.

  Tres amicalement

  George Orwell

  [XVIII, 2963, pp. 226-8; typewritten; original in French]

  1.From Communist pressure.

  2.Three publishers were tried.

  3.Victor Serge (pseudonym of Viktor Kibal'chiche, 1890-1947), edited L'Anarchie, Paris; imprisoned 1912-17 because of his political activities. He attempted to return to Russia in 1917 but was interned and only got to Russia in 1919. He worked with the International Secretariat until disillusioned following the Krondstadt incident, 1921 (see 15.12.46, n. 3). He then worked in Berlin and Vienna for the Comintern. In 1926 returned to Russia and allied himself with Trotsky but was expelled from the Party and in 1933 internally exiled to Orenburg. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1936. He became Paris correspondent of the POUM during the Spanish civil war. He settled in Mexico in 1941 where he died impoverished. His Case of Comrade Tulayev was published by Penguin (2004).

  4.Presumably the photograph reproduced as plate 69 in The World of George Orwell, edited by Miriam Gross (1971).

  To Inez Holden*

  9 April 1946

  27B Canonbury Square

  Islington N 1

  Dear Inez,

  I'm sorry I didn't answer your earlier letter. I've been smothered under work as usual. Your second one, dated March 31st, reached me yesterday. You seem to be having quite an eventful time. I'm glad you got over your illness--I always say that being ill is part of the itinerary in a trip like that. It's due to draughts or the change of diet or something. I have wondered several times whether I detected some of your stuff in the Observer--or are you only collecting stuff to write when you come back? I thought you'd probably notice more about what people were eating and so on than the average observer, and I thought perhaps you had done part of 'Peregrine' 1 one week.

  Not a great deal has happened here. I expect to go away about the end of the month, but there's still a lot of nightmares about repairs to the house and sending furniture. It's unfortunate that Susan has been ill and may have to go into hospital. If she does I shall have to park Richard at a nursery school for a couple of months, because I can't manage him singlehanded for that length of time and anyway I want to go up and get the Jura house livable as soon as the repairs are done. I'm going down to Wallington tomorrow to sort out the furniture and books, and then I hope Pickford's man will come along and tell me when he can remove the stuff. I've also got to buy a lot of stuff. This kind of thing is a complete nightmare to me, but I've no one I can shove it on to.

  It's been quite nice spring weather here, on and off. Richard is extremely well, but is still not talking. He learned to blow a whistle lately, which was rather an affliction for a few days, however luckily he got tired of it. Animal Farm is being translated into 9 languages altogether and one or two of the translations have arrived. It is due to come out in the USA soon. I met the person who is publishing it in France, who turns out to be a woman who has her establishment in Monte Carlo, where she is a little safer than she would be in France. It seems the unofficial censorship in France itself is awful now.

  I'll write and tell Karl2 about his parents. I haven't seen him since you left. He was very down in the mouth about not
being allowed to go back to Germany--at the same time, of course, other people who don't want to go back to their own countries are being made to. You didn't say when you are coming back. As soon as we have the Jura house running I hope you'll come and stay. I think it could be very nice there in the summer once the house is in proper trim.

  With love

  George

  P.S. Isn't it strange, we got a vacuum cleaner recently and Richard is terrified of it. He starts yelling as soon as he sees it, even before it is turned on, and in fact we can't use it when he is in the house. My theory is that he gets some kind of vibration from it which gives him an electric shock.

  [XVIII, 2965, pp. 230-1; typewritten]

  1.A gossip column.

  2.Karl Schnetzler (1906- ), German electrical research engineer. He worked in England, 1935-39, but was then interned (though a refugee) until 1943. He was naturalised British in 1948. He accompanied Eileen when she visited Orwell at Preston Hall Sanatorium. None of his letters to Orwell or those from Orwell to him have been traced. Orwell attempted, through Michael Foot, M P, to again permission for him to visit Germany to see his parents but this was unsuccessful. (See also 1.3.39, n. 1.) To Philip Rahv*

  9 April 1946

  27 B Canonbury Square

  Islington N 1

  Dear Rahv,

  Thanks for your letter of April 4th. I note that you want the next 'London Letter' by about May 20th, and I will despatch it early in May. I am going to drop all my journalistic work here and go to Scotland for 6 months as from about the end of April, but I haven't definitely fixed the date of leaving yet. As soon as I do I'll send you my new address, but any way letters sent to the above would get to me.

  Yes, I saw the article in Time,1 which was a bit of good luck. I have no doubt the book2 will be subject to some boycotting, but so far as this country is concerned I have been surprised by the unfriendly reactions it didn't get. It is being translated into 9 languages. The most difficult to arrange was French. One publisher signed a contract and then said it was 'impossible' for political reasons, others made similar answers--however, I have fixed it with a publisher who is in Monte Carlo and thus feels a bit safer. She is a woman, Odille Pathe, and worth keeping in mind for people who have unpopular books to translate, as she seems to have courage, which is not common in France these last few years. I have no doubt what Camus said was quite true. I am told French publishers are now 'commanded' by Aragon 3 and others not to publish undesirable books (according to my information, Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls was one such). The Communists have no actual jurisdiction in the matter, but it would be in their power, eg., to set fire to a publisher's buildings with the connivance of the police. I don't know how long this kind of thing will go on. In England feeling has undoubtedly been growing against the C.P. In France a year ago I got the impression that hardly anyone cares a damn any longer about freedom of the press etc. The occupation seemed to me to have had a terrible crushing effect even upon people like Trotskyists: or maybe a sort of intellectual decadence had set in years before the war. The only Frenchman I met at that [time] to whom I felt I could talk freely was a man named Raimbaud, a hunchback, who was one of the editors of the little near-Trotskyist weekly Libertes. The queer thing is that with all this moral decay there has over the past decade or so been much more literary talent in France than in England, or than anywhere else, I should say.

  I don't know whether you have seen Polemic, the new bi-monthly review. In the third number I have a long article on James Burnham which I shall reprint afterwards as a pamphlet.4 He won't like it--however, it is what I think.

  Yours

  Geo. Orwell

  [XVIII, 2966, pp. 231-2; typewritten]

  1.The article appeared in Time, 4 February 1946, and was prompted by the publication of Animal Farm in England. Publication in the United States was more than six months later.

  2.Animal Farm.

  3.Louis Aragon (1897-1984), novelist, poet, journalist, and Communist activist, was a leading figure in the Surrealist school; see his first volume of poems, Feu de joie (1920), and his first novel Le Paysan de Paris (1926; English translation, The Night-Walker, 1950). He became a Communist following a visit to Russia in 1930 and he edited the Communist weekly Les Lettres Francaises, 1953-72.

  4.'Second Thoughts on James Burnham', Polemic, 3, May 1946, XVIII, 2989, pp. 268-84. As a pamphlet it was titled James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution, 1946.

  The following letter, sent from Quakenbruck, Northern Germany, urges the need for a translation of Animal Farm for the benefit of refugees, and particularly for those from the Ukraine, and vividly describes readings Ihor Szewczenko1 gave in his own translation for Soviet refugees.

  Ihor Szewczenko* to Orwell 11 April 1946

  c/o K. A. Jelenski, P40-OS, B.A.O.R.2

  Dear Mr. Orwell,

  About the middle of February this year I had the opportunity to read Animal Farm. I was immediately seized by the idea, that a translation of the tale into Ukrainian would be of great value to my countrymen.

  Quite apart from the benefit it would bring to our intelligentsia, only too incidentally acquainted with modern English literary life, a condition due partly to a certain remoteness from the West, such a translation would have a broader 'moral' influence which cannot be too much stressed. It is a matter of fact, that the attitude of the Western World in many recent issues roused serious doubts among our refugees. The somewhat naive interpretation of this attitude oscillated between two poles. For many it looked something like the famous 'tactics', a miscalculated and disastrous device, dictated subconsciously by fear. It seemed to be miscalculated, because the other side is much stronger in this sort of tactics. It was deemed disastrous, because it would lead to a disappointment on the part of the European masses, only too willing to identify the democratic principles with democratic acts.

  By the others this attitude was attributed to the perfect skill with which English public opinion is influenced from outside, to the misconception of the Soviet state and institutions being to a great extent like those of the West, to the inability to penetrate a deliberately created state of confusion, caused by a lack of adequate information, or to something like this.

  Whatever the roots of this alleged attitude might be, the predominance of such an opinion has had a disintegrating influence. The refugees always tend to 'lean against' and to localise their best hopes and their idea of what they consider 'moral perfection'. Such object lacking or failing to justify the expectations, purposelessness and cyni[ci]sm ensue.

  This partdeg of our emigrants who found themselves in exile moved not purely by nationalistic considerations but by what they vaguely felt to be a search for 'human dignity' and 'liberty' were by no means consoled if some right-wing intellectual raised the so called warning voice. They were especially anxious to hear something of this sort from the Socialist quarters, to which they stood intellectually nearer. They wondered how it were possible that nobody 'knew the truth'. The task then was to prove that this assumption of the 'naivete' was at least only partially true. Your book has solved the problem. I can judge it from my own feelings I had after having read it. I daresay the work can be savoured by an 'Eastern' reader in a degree equal to that accessible to an Englishman, the deformation a translation is bound to bring about being outweighed by the accuracy with which almost every 'traceable' sentence of the tale can be traced down to the prototype. For several occasions I translated different parts of Animal Farm ex abrupto. Soviet refugees were my listeners. The effect was striking. They approved of almost all of your interpretations. They were profoundly affected by such scenes as that of animals singing 'Beasts of England' on the hill. Here I saw, that in spite of their attention being primarily drawn on detecting 'concordances' between the reality they lived in and the tale, they very vividly reacted to the 'absolute' values of the book, to the tale 'types', to the underlying convictions of the author and so on. Besides, the mood of the book seems to correspond
with their own actual state of mind.

  For these and similar reasons I ask you for an authorisation to translate Animal Farm into Ukrainian, a task which is already begun.

  I hear from Mr. Jelenski3 that his mother4 has already talked over with you the delicate question of publishing the translation in present conditions.5 I must ask you therefore not to mention my name overmuch and to consider the whole business unofficial for the present.

  Reading this kind of book one is often tempted to speculate about the 'real' opinions of the author. I myself confess to having indulged in this sort of guessing, and I have many questions to put to you, mainly related to your appreciation of certain developments in the USSR, but also many of more technical character, such as the translation of proper names. But this requires a separate letter. For the meantime I apologise for the long delay in addressing you. I was away in South Germany and your letter to Mme Jelenska had not reached me until now.

  Yours sincerely

  Ihor Szewczenko

  [XVIII, 2969, pp. 235-8]

  1.Ihor Szewczenko was, in April 1946, commuting between Munich (where his then wife and mother-in-law, both Soviet-Ukrainian refugees, and he lived) and Quakenbruck in the British Zone of Germany, where a daily newspaper for the Second Polish, the Maczek, Division was published. Szewczenko, who was then twenty-five, had been 'found' after the war by one of its editors, Andre de Vincenz (a school friend from Warsaw), and, though Ukrainian, given work on the newspaper. He was engaged to survey the British Press and paid particular attention to Tribune (picking out 'As I Please'). Another editor, Konstanty ('Kot') Jelenski, put him in touch, through his mother, with Orwell in order that he might ask permission to publish the Ukrainian translation of Animal Farm, upon which he worked every day after lunch in Quakenbruck and in the evenings in Munich.